Famous Quotes & Sayings

John Michael Greer Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 12 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by John Michael Greer.

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Famous Quotes By John Michael Greer

John Michael Greer Quotes 924516

When people insist, as so many of them do, that of course we'll overcome the limits to growth and every other obstacle to our allegedly preordained destiny out there among the stars, all that means is that they have a single story wedged into their imagination so tightly that mere reality can't shake it loose. — John Michael Greer

John Michael Greer Quotes 151180

I've long suspected that one of the reasons why human beings haven't yet figured out how to carry on a conversation with bottlenosed porpoises, African gray parrots, et al. in their own language is quite simply that we're terrified of what they might say to us - not least because it's entirely possible that they'd be right. — John Michael Greer

John Michael Greer Quotes 202365

The future is under no obligation to wait patiently while we get ready for it. — John Michael Greer

John Michael Greer Quotes 272853

Science, at its core, is simply a method of practical logic that tests hypotheses against experience. Scientism, by contrast, is the worldview and value system that insists that the questions the scientific method can answer are the most important questions human beings can ask, and that the picture of the world yielded by science is a better approximation to reality than any other. — John Michael Greer

John Michael Greer Quotes 592049

EROEI [energy returned on energy invested, or net energy] is to a civilization what gross profit is to a business, the source of the surplus that supports the entire enterprise. — John Michael Greer

John Michael Greer Quotes 825539

We have all grown up, one might say, thinking of nature as an
adorable, helpless bunny that some people want to protect and
others, motivated by the will to power that is the unmentionable
force behind so much of contemporary culture, want to stomp into
a bloody pulp just to show that they can. Both sides are mistaken,
for what they have misidentified as a bunny is one paw of a sleep-
ing grizzly bear who, if roused, is quite capable of tearing both sides
limb from limb and feasting on their carcasses. The bear, it must be
remembered, is bigger than we are, and stronger. We forget this at
our desperate peril. — John Michael Greer

John Michael Greer Quotes 980343

There's no such thing as technology in the singular, only technologies in the plural. — John Michael Greer

John Michael Greer Quotes 1489651

It's still popular to ... insist that globalization is a rising tide that lifts all boats, but the hard reality is that the last thirty years have seen America's once proud and prosperous working class thrown to the wolves, so corporations could keep boosting their quarterly profits and the middle class could maintain a filmy illusion of wealth through access to cheap consumer goods. — John Michael Greer

John Michael Greer Quotes 1835573

One the one hand, our economists treat human beings as rational actors making choices to maximize their own economic benefit. On the other hand, the same companies that hire those economists also pay for advertising campaigns that use the raw materials of myth and magic to encourage people to act against their own best interests, whether it's a matter of buying overpriced fizzy sugar water or the much more serious matter of continuing to support the unthinking pursuit of business as usual in the teeth of approaching disaster. — John Michael Greer

John Michael Greer Quotes 1857769

[T]he ideals and desires of the majority define the structure of society as it is; a would-be mass movement that pursues a different path will reliably find itself failing to attract members, while a mass movement that reshapes its message to attract a large audience will inevitably turn into a mechanism for replicating the existing order of things. — John Michael Greer

John Michael Greer Quotes 2133143

Authenticity is about where it comes from; validity is about whether it works. — John Michael Greer

John Michael Greer Quotes 2176397

Between the poor and any appreciation for modern science stands a wall made of failed schools, defunded libraries, denied opportunities, and the systematic use of science and technology to benefit other people at their [the poor's] expense. — John Michael Greer